Date: Sun, 23 Mar 97 3:00:20 EST
From: boddhisatva <kbevans-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: Comments on a NLR article





		Mr. Proyect,


	You are right, in a sense, about model building.  However, I
believe that your particular revolutionary experience leads you to a
"shoot first and ask questions later" model of revolution that is simply
anachronistic. Consider Russia today, vastly more complex than the Russia
which the Soviet bureaucrats attempted to run , and yet its economy is
smaller than Mexico's . I am interested in a method of revolution whereby
the control of a Western economy's assets can be transferred to workers.
What Cockshott and Cottrell have to say is interesting, even vital, but it
does not really deal with the reality of turning over the helm of industry
to the workers.  Neither does a model of political "revolution" within a
reasonably peaceful bourgeois democracy.  A seizure of political power for
the purpose of transferring control of present day firms to the government
is just unreasonable.


	Let Cockshott and Cottrell control the new socialist credit system
- itself a vast and relatively unexplored undertaking.  The only
reasonable way forward in the West is a more syndicalist approach.  Make
the "public company" truly public and establish that institution legally. 
That is a concrete and reasonable goal for the first steps of revolution
and is radical enough in itself.  The contradictions which you rightly see
existing in market socialism will bring about the need for a broader
communitarian expression of government organically, not a priori (or by
some theoretical model). 



	You want to talk about what classes want.  Okay, let's look at the
truth.  Classes want money first and freedom from government, capitalist
and societal intrusion into their lives, and they'll take however many of
the last three they can get. Do they hunger for purpose and community? 
sure, but that has to build out of a movement that gets them the
preceding.  The American "Sandinistas" will not take over the White house
and congress, but GM, Hormel, and Ingersoll-Rand - factory by factory and
office by office.  That will require quite enough in the billy clubs and
banners department to suit even a Che Guevarite such as you.  The rational
debate is not whether there will be a market or state control, but how to
create truer markets and how to integrate the state into market-oriented
units such as banks and capital markets to best express the needs of the
community, the consumer and the co-op.  The revolutionary parties will
have enough on their hands trying to keep unity of purpose among the
unions and other worker organizations.



	Melding the state and business hierarchy is not a revolutionary idea.
What is a revolutionary idea is actually letting the chickens run the
coop (or co-op) .  We already have central bankers.  We don't need central
steel executives.  We have drug czars, why institute semi-conductor czars? 
Many countries have been down the road of centralizing economic power, and
it has not been pretty.  I say that we must radicalize the firm, then
radicalize government, just as the capitalists did during the bourgeois
revolutions.  


		peace






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